I know a guy who makes pretty good money driving around neighborhoods that have homeowner associations looking for violations of the HOA regulations, then reporting them. If you belong to an HOA in the area and your neighborhood is less than ten years old or so, there’s a non-negligible chance he patrols it.
So these residents not only avoid concerning themselves with reporting, but even the burden of being directly bothered by something is removed. Someone is paid to be bothered for them.
And my guess is that a substantial majority of them are (or would be) just fine with the idea of a professional tattletale cruising their streets.
How did we get to this place, where so many people value this kind of thing so much more highly than minding their own business?
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Ugh. I was nervous when we bought our house because it meant joining an HOA. However, the neighborhood is over 20 years old and the HOA is mainly used for collecting dues which are used to keep up the common areas, and that part is fine by me. Otherwise, there doesn’t seem to be anyone actively policing things like non white curtains showing (oh, the horror). Which is exactly as I like it. This is one of the reasons we specifically looked for a not-new home.
I despise HOA’s. I can’t see how, in this day and age of heavy litigation for rights, including individual rights, that someone hasn’t sued to invalidate most of the powers HOA’s have. If I own property, I should have the right to keep that property in any manner I see fit. I’m also curious how the citizens united ruling changed the relationships there… B/c I’m pretty sure most HOA’s must be some sort of legally incorporated entity. Wouldn’t that make it effectively one person suing another for “not cutting their grass the right way”…?
Now if there’s some sort of common area/resource that’s funded by the HOA, that’s fine. Vote and argue (or agree) your brains out over how that place is kept up.
The HOA in my neighborhood expired before I was born, but the old folks here still want to try to enforce it; however, I think they finally gave up on us – that and most of the old folks are dying off or moving into care facilities (like the one they tried to prevent a homeowner from having in her home). They continue to try to collect dues and I continue to see them accumulating in their newsletter but they do nothing of value with said dues. Instead they use them to sue random people (like said neighbor trying to take care of elderly in her home, or the church across the pkwy for having too big of a sign, or the golf course just in case they might shine their lights this way instead of actually aiming them AT the golf course). On the upside these old folks have so much time on their hands and have the mayor on speed dial so our streets are usually the first to get plowed when it snows.
I’ll never have anything to do with an HOA. The only possible exception I can think of would be if we were ever in position to live in a beachfront condominium, we wouldn’t have a choice.
But that’s a different value proposition, isn’t it? That’s not some dickhead worried about whether my flowers are on the approved species list while I’m trying to earn a living and raise children.